Nashville gets 2030 Super Bowl. Why NFL picked Music City, new stadium

Nashville will host Super Bowl LXIV in 2030 at the new Nissan Stadium.
The NFL’s owners voted to approve Nashville as the host city during league meetings in Orlando.
The new $2.1 billion stadium is scheduled to be completed in 2027.

It’s Nashville’s turn.

The city of Nashville and the Tennessee Titans will officially host Super Bowl LXIV in 2030, bringing America’s marquee sporting event and the most-watched televised spectacle every year to Music City for the first time. An honor bestowed on Nashville and the new Nissan Stadium construction project, the game will make Nashville just the 17th metro area to host a Super Bowl.

National Football League owners voted May 19 to approve Nashville as Super Bowl LXIV host at the league meetings in Orlando. Titans controlling owner Amy Adams Strunk was present for the vote, while Titans CEO Burke Nihill and Nashville Convention & Visitors Corp CEO Deana Ivey made one final presentation to the league’s owners prior to the vote.

“We’re used to doing big events and we do them really, really well,” Ivey told The Tennessean prior to the announcement. “Nashville’s going to be a fantastic city for the Super Bowl. If you think about it, the cities that do the best with the Super Bowl are the cities that people like to visit other times of year.”

Nihill emphasized this win positions the city for more world-class events.

“I think this is an opportunity for us to do great things for the city and for the people of our city while it’s here, but then also leave a long tail,” Nihill added. “That’s the legacy of Super Bowls is great things are left in the wake of the Super Bowl for schools and local businesses. I look forward to the next few years because we (in Nashville) can do that better than anyone else.”

The city of Nashville will formally announce and celebrate its coronation as a Super Bowl city with a press conference at 9 a.m. on May 20 and a party on Lower Broadway that evening at 7:30 p.m.

Governor Bill Lee, Mayor Freddie O’Connell, former Governor Bill Haslam and NFL Vice President for League Events Peter O’Reilly will join Nihill and Ivey at the press conference. The community celebration will feature live music, a drone show and fireworks, weather permitting.

Nashville, new Nissan Stadium will host Super Bowl 64: What locals need to know

New Nissan Stadium construction is on schedule to be completed in Feb. 2027 and to open to the Titans’ tenancy that fall. Nashville joins other major cities like Los Angeles, Las Vegas, San Francisco, Minneapolis and Atlanta as metro areas that have been awarded Super Bowls shortly after completing new stadium projects.

NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell mentioned several times he believed Nashville was just “a stadium away” from hosting a Super Bowl. Nihill pointed to the success of Nashville’s turn hosting the 2019 NFL Draft as a launching point that accelerated the plans, since many of the sitting members of the NFL’s event planning and selection committee worked closely with Nashville and the Titans during that event.

“I think we recognized that the biggest events in the world like the Super Bowl and the Final Four and the College Football Playoff championships, those are events that this city would do as well or probably better than any other city,” Nihill said. “We were a stadium away from being able to host those events. Certainly that was always something that we had in mind. It’s no surprise to us that, now that the stadium is a reality, that the NFL has decided to get here as soon as they can.”

Construction began on the new Nissan Stadium project with its Feb. 2024 groundbreaking. The enclosed venue will seat 60,000 fans but can be expanded for major events and is expected to include standing-room-only ticket options for select events. The stadium cost $2.1 billion to build, including a $1.26 billion public loan to be repaid with stadium revenue, which at the time of approval was the largest public investment into a stadium in United States history.

The Tennessee Titans, Nashville’s East Bank and the Super Bowl

As Nihill alluded, the Super Bowl is hardly the only major event Nashville is courting. Everything from the NCAA football and basketball championships to WWE Wrestlemania is being discussed now that Nashville has a suitable home for them. The East Bank revitalization project, at which Nissan Stadium is the center point, will also allow Nashville to court major entertainment events and business conferences, continuing the pledge to grow Nashville into one of the nation’s premiere destination cities.

Ivey pointed out that 60% attendees for concerts at sporting events in the existing Nissan Stadium come from out of town. The expectation is the Super Bowl will function like several of those events wrapped into one week, with all the private parties, concerts, corporate events and fan experiences that come with hosting an event so large in scale.

Per data shared with The Tennessean by the Nashville Convention & Visitors Corp, the greater Nashville market will grow from having 61,000 available hotel rooms to more than 80,000 hotel rooms by 2030.

Super Bowl LXIV will be organized through partnerships between the NCVC, the Titans, Music City Major Event Inc., and the Nashville Super Bowl Bid Committee.

Nick Suss is the Titans beat writer for The Tennessean. Contact Nick at [email protected]. Follow Nick on X @nicksuss. Subscribe to the Talkin’ Titans newsletter for updates sent directly to your inbox.